Narration Read online

  NARRATION

  FOUR LECTURES BY

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  THORNTON WILDER

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO · ILLINOIS

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, London

  Copyright 1935 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published December 1935

  Paperback edition 2010

  Foreword © 2010 by Liesl M. Olson

  Printed in the United States of America

  19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77154-0 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77154-7 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77155-7 (electronic)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946.

  Narration : four lectures / by Gertrude Stein ; with an introduction by Thornton Wilder.

  p. cm.

  Lectures delivered by Gertrude Stein in 1935 at the University of Chicago.

  Originally published: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1935.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77154-0 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77154-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Wilder, Thornton, 1897–1975. II. Title.

  PN187.S73 2010

  808.3—dc22

  2009043294

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY LIESL M. OLSON (2010)

  INTRODUCTION BY THORNTON WILDER (1935)

  LECTURE 1

  LECTURE 2

  LECTURE 3

  LECTURE 4

  FOREWORD

  GERTRUDE STEIN delivered her Narration lectures to packed halls at the University of Chicago in 1935. She was visiting the city as part of an American lecture tour that took her throughout the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and California1 at a time when her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an account of life with Alice B. Toklas and their artistic salon in Paris, had just transformed her into a literary celebrity. Stein’s witty anecdotes about famous artists and writers like Picasso, Hemingway, and Gide had attracted scores of readers previously uninterested in her more experimental writing. She was, as her friend the photographer Carl Van Vechten warned her before she came to America, “on every tongue like Greta Garbo.”2 Gertrude Stein’s name did indeed light up New York City marquees when she first arrived, and across the country, in every town and city, she was greeted by crowds.

  Stein delivered her Narration lectures in the American city she and Toklas preferred above all the others: during these travels, they visited Chicago four times. In 1934, they attended the Chicago premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera Stein had written with Virgil Thomson. On their second stay, Stein spoke to both academic and nonacademic audiences all over the city. She drew huge crowds at her book signing at the fashionable Marshall Field’s Department Store: Fanny Butcher, the literary editor of the Chicago Tribune and a friend of Stein’s, described in her journal how the store was “so jammed that they wouldn’t even let us off the third floor…we nearly lost our lives getting to [Stein and Toklas].”3 The Chicago newspapers—especially the society pages— covered every aspect of Stein’s visits, from the dark plum-colored gown she wore to the opera to the compelling tenor of her voice when she lectured at the Arts Club.

  Gertrude Stein’s reception in Chicago illustrates the surprising fact that she secured a popular audience long before she was read in the academy. Day after day, she was shepherded around Chicago by Butcher and various literary ladies: Alice Roullier, a patron of the arts who had traveled with Butcher to France in 1931 and met Stein and Toklas there; Maude Hutchins, aspiring novelist and wife of Robert Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago; and Elizabeth Fuller Good speed—known as “Bobsy”—who cut a dashing figure in Chicago’s cultural life and arranged a splendid dinner for Stein and Toklas. These women adored Stein for her liberating humor, her gender bending, and the playfulness of her work. They saw this powerful woman at the center of the modernist movement in Paris as their access to the European avant-garde.

  During her second visit to the city, Stein also met the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Thornton Wilder, who would remain a lifelong friend. Wilder was then teaching at the University of Chicago; he advocated her work to his academic peers, some of whom were initially reluctant to welcome Stein to campus. She clashed, for example, with Mortimer Adler, architect of the university’s “great books” program.4 Nonetheless, Robert Hutchins—probably recognizing her popular appeal and encouraged by his wife—asked Stein if she would come back later in her tour. So a few months later Stein and Toklas returned for nearly three weeks, staying in Wilder’s Hyde Park home in the Midway-Drexel Apartment Hotel at 6020 Drexel Avenue, while she wrote and delivered her Narration lectures and team-taught undergraduate seminars with Wilder.

  Stein had not been back to the United States since she left for France in 1903, and her Narration lectures reflect on the changes in American culture apparent to her after thirty years abroad. The lectures also register the effect of fame upon Stein’s sense of herself. She initially welcomed the attention from the American press and public—to her mind, it had been a long time coming—but the last lecture also hints at the destabilizing effect that fame would have on her. (Stein experienced an unusual bout of writer’s block on returning to France.) Though these lectures expand on the themes of the talks Stein gave earlier and elsewhere (published as Lectures in America), they are unique in that Stein wrote them while she was here: fresh and inquisitive, the lectures overall pay tribute to the openness, energy, and mobility of American people and institutions.

  Stein suggests that American writers—Henry James, for instance, one of her most important literary models—changed narrative structures in exciting ways to reflect new narrative forms in modern life. That is, Americans understood the fundamental openness of “a beginning and a middle and an ending.” As an example, Stein offers in the second lecture a description of how during the First World War, French people were interested “in seeing the American soldiers standing, standing and doing nothing standing for a long time not even talking but just standing and being watched by the whole French population.” A “modern” narrative need not have an event, according to Stein; nothing need “happen.” On this point, Stein echoes James, who suggested much earlier in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) that an “incident” in a novel could be simply “for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way.”5

  But unlike Henry James, who, on returning to America in 1904 after twenty years abroad, was appalled by the “alien” influences eroding the English language, Stein found that the mobility and lack of convention in American life (the lack of a “daily island life”) fostered the most dynamic developments in twentieth-century art and literature. She emphasizes in her first lecture “how the pressure of the non daily life living of the American nation has forced the words to have a different feeling of moving.” Her openness to changes in the English language may have resulted from the circumstances of her own upbringing: she was born to German-Jewish immigrants and her family lived in Vienna and Paris during the very early years of her life. In her own experience, the English language had always been influenced by immigrant and foreign usages. Despite the fact that she very rarely wrote in French, her experimental play with language—“Steinese,” as the newspapers called it—reflects he
r polyglot upbringing and the cosmopolitan environment of her Paris salon. Suggesting that American English is naturally less tied to tradition than its British counterpart is, Stein connects her own purposely nonstandard English with the innovative spirit of the country that she was reencountering with such pleasure on her tour.

  Although these lectures were originally published in 1935 without titles, Stein had provisional titles in mind that indicate that the final two lectures concern the subject of history.6 She illustrates her idiosyncratic conception of history in her description of American newspapers in the third lecture, and in her reflections on her status as a historical figure (an “orator”) in the last. Fundamentally, Stein questions how history is written—that is, how newspapers account for events, including no doubt the event of her own presence in America. “I said newspapers make things too easy,” she says in the third lecture. During her tour, she herself was asked to contribute six pieces to the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers, in which she discussed aspects of American life (food, crime, and education are a few of her topics).7 In these pieces she avoided the conventions of newspaper writing, which in her account made events in the past seem as if they were happening in the present, giving a false impression of narrative. Stein was attracted to the dynamic quality of many forms of the American language (including road signs, advertisements, conversation, and slang), but she thought newspapers did not register the most important experiences in human life, which “exist” rather than “happen.” (“Love” is the example she gives in her third lecture.) Stein’s prose style aims to embody “existing,” a sense of all things as present, unfinished, and immediate.

  However, reading Gertrude Stein’s work—even her more straightforward lectures—is never an easy endeavor. One should keep in mind that her rejection of certain grammatical standards is a way of giving more autonomy to a reader. She was open to various interpretations apart from finding neat or right or even clearly articulated responses to them (one of the reasons that she disagreed with stricter versions of “how to read a book,” in Mortimer Adler’s terms).8 As soon as Stein arrived in the United States, her editor at Random House encouraged her to appear in a Pathé newsreel that was shown in movie theaters across the country. In this short film, she gave an overview of the lectures she would give, suggesting that her listeners would understand the lectures if they allowed themselves simply to enjoy the experience. “My lectures are to be a simple way to say that if you understand a thing you enjoy it and if you enjoy a thing you understand it,” she says in the film. “Understanding and enjoying is the same thing.”9 It helps to read Stein’s lectures aloud, since she wrote them originally to be heard: The insistences of her verbal performance become more apparent, and the difficulty of her work gives way to an aural experience less tied to analytical meaning. Even when delivering these lectures to a university crowd, Gertrude Stein meant them to be provocative and playful, and most important, to give pleasure.

  LIESL M. OLSON

  * * *

  (Endnotes)

  Special thanks to David Pavelich, Reference and Instruction Librarian at the Special Collections Research Center, and Bibliographer for Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the University of Chicago Library, for his help in contextualizing Stein’s Narration lectures.

  1 For a complete itinerary of Stein’s American tour, see William Rice, “Gertrude Stein’s American Lecture Tour,” in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

  2 Edward Burns, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, vol. 1, 1913–1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 277.

  3 Fanny Butcher, Diary, December 1, 1934. Fanny Butcher Papers, Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago.

  4 See my longer article on Stein’s visits to Chicago: “‘An invincible force meets an immovable object’: Gertrude Stein comes to Chicago,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 4 (November 2009).

  5 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html.

  6 In a letter, Toklas mentions the titles of the lectures as follows: “The American Language and How It Is Made,” “Narrative in Prose and Poetry,” “Is History Narrative,” and “Is History Literature.” See Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel Steward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 125.

  7 These newspaper articles are reprinted in How Writing is Written, vol. 2, ed. Robert Bartlett Hass (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974).

  8 How to Read a Book is the title of Adler’s 1940 best-selling guide to reading comprehension.

  9 Gertrude Stein, “Pathé,” in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 351.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN NOVEMBER of 1934 Miss Gertrude Stein delivered before an audience of five hundred students at the University of Chicago the lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” which is now printed in the volume entitled Lectures in America. At the invitation of the University she returned in March, 1935, to read before approximately the same audience the four lectures contained in this volume. In addition ten conferences were arranged during which Miss Stein amplified the ideas contained in these lectures by means of general discussion with some thirty selected students.

  There are a number of ways in which these lectures may be approached. In the first place they are in themselves models of artistic form. The highly individual idiom in which they are written reposes upon an unerring ear for musical cadence and upon a conviction that repetition is a form of insistence and emphasis that is characteristic of all life, of history, and of nature itself. “If a thing is really existing there can be no repetition…. . Then we have insistence insistence that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same not even when it is most the same that is when it has been taught.” In the printed version of the lectures the individuality of the idiom has been enhanced by the economy of the punctuation, which has been explained by Miss Stein as being a form of challenge to a livelier collaboration on the part of the reader. “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it…. . The longer, the more complicated the sentence the greater the number of the same kinds of words I had following one another, the more the very many more I had of them I felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma…. . A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make yourself know yourself knowing it.”

  Another approach to these lectures lies in seeing them as object-lessons of the teaching method. Nothing is learned save in answer to a deeply lodged and distinctly stated question. Beginning with a calculated simplicity, these lectures first prepare and provoke the correct questions in the listeners’ minds. One is irresistibly reminded of the request that Dante put to his guide, and which might serve as a motto for all education:

  …io pregai che mi largisse il pasto

  Di cui largito m’aveva il disio.

  …I prayed him to bestow on me the food, for

  which he had already bestowed on me the appetite.

  These are real rewards, but the great reward of these lectures lies in the richness and vitality of the ideas contained in them. We soon discover that we are not to hear about narration from the point of view that the rhetorics usually discuss the subject. We hear nothing of the proportion of exposition to narrative, of where to place a climax, of how to heighten vividness through the use of illustrative detail. Here we return to first principles, indeed: “Narration is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen, that has happened or will happen in any way.” There is an almost terrifyi
ng exactness in Miss Stein’s use of the very words that the rest of the world employs so loosely: everybody, everything, and every way. Consequently the discussion leads at once into the realms of psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics, to a theory of knowledge and a theory of time. These matters are treated, however, not in the Latinizing jargon of the manuals, but in the homely language of colloquial usage. The great and exhilarating passage in the third lecture, describing the difference between “existing” and “happening,” that begins: “The inside and the outside, the outside which is outside and the inside which is inside are not when they are inside and outside are not inside in short they are not existing, that is inside…. . ”—such a passage might have been rendered in terms of “subjective and objective phenomena”; it might have been more academically impressive; it could not have been clearer; and it would have lost that quality of rising from the “daily life” and from our “common knowledge” which is the vitalizing character of Miss Stein’s ideas.

  These ideas are presented to us in a highly abstract form. Miss Stein pays her listeners the high compliment of dispensing for the most part with that apparatus of illustrative simile and anecdote that is so often employed to recommend ideas. She assumes that the attentive listener will bring, from a store of observation and reflection, the concrete illustration of her generalization. This is what renders doubly stimulating, for example, the treatment of the differences between English and American literature, and the distinction between prose and poetry-a critical principle which from the earlier lecture has already made so marked an impression and which in the present lectures receives a further development. In the present series, however, the outstanding passages will undoubtedly be those dealing with the psychology of the creative act as the moment of “recognition” and the discussion of the relations between the artist and the audience-a subject now the center of critical speculation in many quarters and which here receives distinguished and profound treatment.